I’m an interdisciplinary writing teacher with a focus in Comparative Literatures, North American diasporic, Irish and Indigenous literatures, as well as a background in cultural anthropology, ethnography, and journalism.
I came to Yukon University from Thompson Rivers University where I worked on the small Williams Lake campus, primarily with learners from local Secwepemc, Xat’súll and Tsilhqot’in communities. Previously I taught in the Department of Comparative Studies at The Ohio State University and in American Studies at the University of Wyoming, where I spent multiple summers teaching and advising in a preparation program for first-generation university students from rural and Indigenous backgrounds in & around the Wind Rivers.
I teach Composition, Literature, Environmental Studies and a number of upper level humanities courses. In 2019 I worked with students, elders and the wider community to design a better Indigenous Literature course for Yukon University which takes a multi-textual approach to story telling. We explored ways to forefront dignity and respect in the study of Indigenous literary texts, and to connect the curriculum with local Yukon First Nations cultures, languages and concerns. Our course continues to develop today. In my time at Yukon U I have also designed and taught 200-level courses on Ecological Literatures and Environmental Perspectives, with specific attention to Northern contexts. I teach a course on ‘The North in Literature’ using distance technology and have been working to offer more English electives remotely to improve access for learners in smaller Yukon communities. This has included a successful series of COIL ‘virtual student exchanges’ with a university in Mexico as well as flexible delivery of most of our English offerings.
In 2024 I was selected to design an exemplar course for the Laera Institute at the University of the Arctic on ‘Representations of the Circumpolar North’. This course can be adapted, elaborated and taught by UArctic member faculty throughout the Circumpolar region:
https://laerainstitute.org/resources/exemplar-courses
In May 2024 I traveled to Arctic Congress in Bodø, Norway to present on this work and learn more about Circumpolar education.
As a researcher in the USA I worked on issues surrounding urban policy and homelessness while based in an emergency shelter in Colorado. For my doctoral dissertation I conducted an ethnographic study investigating attitudes towards mobility and housing loss and the ways in which cultural stereotypes of homelessness influence urban policy:
https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odb_etd/etd/r/1501/10?clear=10&p10_accession_num=osu1417675567
Nowadays, I am most engaged by the scholarship of teaching and learning, especially questions of curriculum design in remote and Indigenous education settings.
I am a keen backcountry skier, avalanche skills instructor and ski patroller at Mt. Sima, Whitehorse’s local ski hill. I am an Avalanche Practitioner level member of the Canadian Avalanche Association and have served on the board of the Yukon Avalanche Association, as well as working part-time for Avalanche Canada’s Yukon field team. I’m interested in ways in which social science and humanities research is shaping conversations around risk management and ‘human factors’ in mountain environments, and I’d like to conduct research in this area in the future.
https://www.avalancheassociation.ca/members/?id=46480419
I hold a Ph.D. from The Ohio State University, dual Masters degrees from the University of Wyoming and the University of Sheffield, and earned my BA at the University of East Anglia and University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I graduated from Butte High School in Montana as an exchange student.
Originally an Irish & British national, and more recently a Canadian one too, my family and I have lived in the territories of the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council and Kwanlin Dün First Nation since 2018 and love to call this place home.
